


Valued Associates

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: F/F, Murder, Sexual Content, inappropriate use of weapons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:40:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23873308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: The first time they fuck it happens in the Ratway, and afterwards Astrid tells Maven she has a present for her.
Relationships: Astrid/Maven Black-Briar
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16
Collections: Minigame: Round 1





	Valued Associates

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



When they fuck for the first time it happens in the Ratway.

Maven’s returning from a less-than-satisfactory meeting with Mercer Frey, who’s getting more paranoid by the day, insisting on privacy and on her entering and leaving his house - the house _she_ gave him - by the exit in the sewers. Not that she had much choice since all the windows and doors have been nailed shut. Down here in the labyrinth of the sewers echoes carry strangely. Voices are funnelled down from above ground, and the grotesquely enlarged shadows of skeevers lope across the tunnel walls, so at first she's convinced that Mercer has had her followed. He’s getting worse at hiding his contempt for her, and has proved increasingly willing to hire the services of the Brotherhood of late, so it isn’t that she’s surprised to find an assassin waiting for her, only that the assassin turns out to be Astrid.

Her mind has been playing on the subject of the Brotherhood of late, and not just because she’s started to wonder if Mercer is starting to become too much of a liability. So far he’s kept the guild going through a degree of ruthless savagery of which Maven thoroughly approves, but his drinking is worse than ever and the guild grows less useful with every passing day. Not only that, but he’s planning something, and something that doesn’t involve her. The time might come when she may need to remove him. Even if, despite herself, she rather likes him. He is, after all, a man willing to wield his own knife.

It's the matter of her daughter that really troubles her. Ingun has been even more distracted than usual, stirring her food about her plate at dinner and clearly circling around a topic of conversation, trying to work out how to broach it. And when she did approach her mother, coming straight from her studies with her fingers stained yellow and the acrid reek of crushed nirnroot clinging to her hair, her request wasn’t at all what Maven had expected.

Did she have contacts in the Dark Brotherhood, Ingun wanted to know.

It was a question which they both knew the answer to, and knew also, when Maven hedged her bets and claimed she might know somebody who knew somebody, that she was lying in order to stall for time. Her dealings with the Brotherhood were hardly a well-hidden secret, even outside the walls of their home, but Ingun had never once brought the subject up until now.

Maven’s feelings about her daughter are complicated. Being a mother is invariably about choking down disappointment and drowning it out with unduly inflated pride, and this is no less true of Ingun than it is of her brothers: she may have learned a trade (and one as perennially useful as poison, no less), but she has no head for business, and this, besides, is a request which Maven has her doubts about, even if she doesn’t quite know why. Something twisted in her heart at the thought of her daughter, her only daughter, joining the Brotherhood. It's still twisting now.

She’d think about it, she said, and, at the flare of hurt and anger in Ingun’s eyes, insisted that she meant it.

But even with that somewhat-grudging concession, there was no doubt it wasn’t the answer Ingun wanted, and she could be as spoilt as her brothers in some ways, for all that she was better at hiding it. After she stalked off, Maven paused in thought for a moment, then removed her concealed box from her desk, unstoppered the bottle within, and placed two drops of the bitter substance within on the back of her tongue. She’s been taking it for decades, this substance of her own concoction, increasing the daily dose – which would under normal circumstances have been enough to kill a man twice her size – from one drop to two. Not that she didn’t trust her daughter, but it was always wise to be cautious. While Ingun might not have a head for business, she always was more proactive than her brothers.

She thinks now of Ingun meeting Astrid, of Astrid’s mocking smile, bending close to Ingun to murmur something in her ear, and Maven shivers without quite knowing why.

Astrid, lounging against the wall, jerks her head back the way Maven came. “I don’t think he likes me much,” she says.

“Frey? I wouldn’t take it to heart. He doesn’t like anyone.” Maven pauses, then continues acidly. “Has he hired the Brotherhood to kill me?”

“And I chose to come and do the job myself? The personal touch.” Astrid laughs her low throaty laugh. “No, he didn’t hire me, but perhaps he should have done. The guild is falling apart about his ears. How long will you allow that to continue, I wonder?”

“Perhaps I see opportunity in the ruin of the guild.”

“Or you can’t think of anyone better to take it over.”

And then she’s too close, moving fast, wielding a dagger so quickly Maven doesn’t even glimpse it until it’s at her throat and Astrid is pressing her back against the brickwork. Maven’s hand jerks towards her own dagger, but the point digs deeper in a warning, enough to draw blood. Reluctantly, she drops her hand and presses it flat against the brickwork, clenching her jaw. Not Mercer, perhaps, but there’s no shortage of people who’d happily see her dead.

They’ve had plenty of dealings over the years, her and Astrid. Theirs has been a long and profitable relationship, but this is business, and something more than business – she’s performed the Black Sacrament enough times herself to know that.

Nothing personal.

No more than the contact she’s been cultivating in the Penitus Oculatus is personal. Or the multiple copies of the letter she’s arranged to be delivered to him should she happen to die before her time.

The tip of the blade scrapes down over the skin of her throat with an exquisite sting of pain. Astrid sets her hand against the damp brickwork beside Maven’s head, her expression entranced as she watches the blood beading beneath the bite of the knife in fascination, as though no matter how many times she sees this, she never fails to find it a source of wonder. Then she drops her head, and delicately collects the blood with the tip of her tongue. Maven can taste it on her lips when Astrid kisses her.

“Tell me,” Astrid says, her voice conversational, as if they’re discussing the weather and not murder, “if someone _had_ sent me to kill you, would you want to know who it was?”

* * *

Maven Black-Briar was sixteen when she hired the Dark Brotherhood to kill her father. It was the culmination of a lesson her mother taught her, about the importance of ruthlessness.

She had to save for two years to put together their fee, scrimping and saving every Septim. Worth every penny, but even so it wasn’t enough. It solved some of her problems, that murder, but not all of them and her brother was proving all too willing to take over their father’s work frittering away what was left of the fortune their mother had built. And he was every bit as stubborn as she was and unwilling to listen to reason.

Even back then no one in Riften was overly fond of either her or her family, and gossip was free. There was already talk about her father’s death, about the daughter who barely seemed to mourn him, and in any case she didn’t have enough coin for a second contract and she was damned if she was going to wait another two years scrabbling for pennies and patching her worn-out clothes.

So for her brother it was a head injury from falling down the stairs while drunk and a long slow decline, nursed by his beloved sister. Though it ran her ragged, she also took on the work of running their various businesses, steering them with a steady hand into less fractious waters. 

He realised before the end, she knew that much. She saw it in his eyes while she spooned poison between his slack and flaking lips. By then speech was long beyond him, and writing too – she’d made damned sure of that.

A tragedy, but only for the best in the long run. He hadn’t the wit nor the talent to step into her mothers shoes, and he had none of her ruthlessness: he was soft-hearted where their father was cruel, but too headstrong to do what they all knew was for the best and hand the reins of their mother’s hard-won business empire over to her.

She had recourse to call on the Dark Brotherhood’s services over the years, but never forgot the importance of being willing to do your own dirty work. With the Dark Brotherhood the process of arranging an assassination was not the clean financial transaction it was in Morrowind, but something altogether more artistic – the poetic simplicity of the ritual and the complexities of obtaining the necessary supplies, the bones and body parts, the muscular glistening slick of internal organs, were anything but clean. A long time ago, so she’d heard, the body parts used in the Sacrament had to come from a victim you’d killed yourself, a death in payment for a death. Each of the Black Sacraments she performed over the years were reminders that it never did to divorce yourself from the realities of what you were asking for, because it was impossible to maintain control over a business empire without getting your hands dirty. The Sacrament was repulsive and messy, but there was a meditative power to it too, and each time she knelt, the words on her lips, the hot-iron reek of blood in her nostrils and throat, she heard the call of the Void rising to a roar in her ears and heart, singing to her like a mother.

It was nothing like love, that feeling, not that she’d recognise such a thing in any case, but something more like recognition. Or acknowledgement. Things that in her experience would do just as well, and were, frankly, probably much more useful.

The Sacrament was blood and mess, a fist clenching around the hilt of an iron dagger, and hunger singing out in her blood. It was an act of worship for a woman with no interest whatsoever in the gods. It was _glorious._

Until it stopped working.

Until the people she wanted dead kept on living, meeting with no unfortunate accidents if she wished to keep their deaths quiet or in bloody spectacle if she wanted a message sent, and the well-oiled machine ground to a halt like a Dwemer constuct, cleverly wrought but ultimately fallible.

And she learnt another lesson then: that the only person you can truly rely on is yourself.

* * *

It was Astrid who came to her, although Maven wouldn’t find out her name until several years later, and it happened, perhaps wisely on Astrid’s part, away from Skyrim. Later Maven would recognise the deception, the illusory attempt at making the Brotherhood’s reach seem wider than it truly was. She approved: it was very likely what she would have chosen to do, along with the place where Astrid chose to approach her, at her most vulnerable in a bathhouse in the Imperial City, where she was sweating out her frustrations at the agent of the East Empire Company she was dealing with, an objectionable little worm who had proved even greedier than most of his ilk, grossly overstepping the bounds of what Maven judged a reasonable amount to skim off the top (he was an Imperial after all).

The attendant was far, far too good at her job, combing out Maven’s hair with slow measured strokes of the brush and barely a twinge as the bristles caught in the occasional. In the movement of her hands over the scalp, Maven could detect the barely-perceptible prickle of cleverly applied Restoration magic loosening her muscles and soothing away the lingering bumps and aches from her long journey. Talented hands and beautiful as well, with a cool measuring gaze and a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. Maven approved: she liked to know when she was being lied to. The warmth and the sensations were soothing, lulling her into a drowse, until the moment the girl leaned close, bringing her lips to Maven’s ear.

“Tell me his name,” she murmured.

“Whose name?” Maven asked sharply, irritated by the girl’s cheek, but impressed too, despite herself.

“The man you want dead.”

Maven went still. The girl’s hands continued to work at her shoulders, until Maven pulled away, staring at her. The girl ceased her ministrations, smiling with a conspiratorial air. Her eyes, though, her eyes were like flint, and in them Maven saw a reflection of her own, the same darkness she’d see when she looked at herself in the mirror and saw the Void staring back. This was, she thought, a woman all too familiar with the concept of getting her hands dirty, despite her youth and golden hair, the thin silken tunic that left her seemingly vulnerable, unarmed at first glance. And the conspiratorial air was feigned: Maven recognised a power-play when she saw one, she’d wielded the technique of fear over her own employees often enough.

“Horatius Cato,” she said, because she was nothing but practical, and she really would quite like to see the greedy grasping little shit floating in the Rumare with his throat slit. Still something about this felt wrong. She hadn’t performed the Sacrament. There’d been no meditative laying out of candles and body parts, no roaring of the emptiness in her heart. “I expect to have it done cleanly and quietly. Make it look like an accident, but make sure it's done after I’ve left Cyrodiil. _If_ you can manage that?”

The girl inclined her head. “Consider it done. And, as compensation for the disruption to our services, we’ll waive our fee.”

“I suppose you expect me to be grateful,” Maven said. “You’ve been less than reliable of late. On second thoughts, perhaps I should call for the guards instead.”

“You could,” the girl agreed, her low throaty voice deepening still further with amusement despite the mock-regretful pout of her lips. “But then the owners of the bathhouse would be forced to hire new guards. That would be unfortunate. And embarrassing for you. You’re far too practical a woman for that.”

“You speak as if you know me,” Maven said coldly.

“Oh, but I do know you. I’ve been watching you a long time. You’re a woman after my own heart. Which is why I’ve come myself, to promise you that normal services are to be resumed. The… personal touch.”

“Promises are worthless to me, girl,” Maven retorted. “It’s results that matter. If I can’t trust you to deliver results, then what use are you, exactly?”

The girl’s eyes hardened, although her smile never slipped. Maven felt the first twinge of genuine fear. “Wait a little while,” the girl suggested, rising from the bench. “Let our work speak for itself. If you’re happy with the results of the contract, then we can speak more in future. Agreed?”

“Very well.” Before the girl can slip away, Maven reached out and caught hold of her wrist. “Tell me one thing though. What happened to the Brotherhood? Why did you stop responding to the Sacrament?”

The girl paused a while before answering, considering her reply, and when it finally came Maven gritted her teeth – she always had hated riddles.

“Nobody was listening,” Astrid said.

* * *

The sex is a raw, sordid thing, less a lovemaking session than a fighting match, violent enough to leave them both marked afterwards, scratched bloody and bruised. There’s a bed with a broken frame, filthy and probably crawling with lice – and Maven makes a mental note to visit the apothecary when she has the chance – but she finds it rather suits her mood. There’s an honesty about the filth and the grime that would have been missing from an encounter in a more luxurious setting, cradled in silken sheets and comfort.

Astrid has a dancer’s frame, lithe and well-muscled, and Maven, who has little time for either envy or vanity, is content to explore and admire a body whose perfection is marred only by scars, and Astrid has a lot of scars.

It’s strange to have her vulnerable like this, at her mercy, splayed beneath her hands, bared to her touch like a pinned butterfly. Eyes closed, head flung back. Even when Maven finds Astrid's dagger, the vicious hooked little thing, with a yellow-gleaming discolouration on the very tip of the razor-sharp blade, and Astrid must know she has it. It’s much heavier than Maven is expecting, and as she holds it her breath catches. There’s a tightening in her chest which feels like bands of steel squeezing tight. It's old, this blade. Ancient. She’s handled daedric artefacts before, and so has sensed something of their latent power, but never anything like this, the essence of Sithis distilled into a blade as vicious and barbed as its wielder’s heart.

She’s come already, but there’s a pressure in her chest that feels like the building of an orgasm, and the hilt curves around her fist, as though it was meant for her. It’s been a long time since she took a life with her own hands, and even then she never used a dagger to do it. She’s never once felt the hot spill of blood over her hand, its scent so thick in the air she can taste it. So much for her being willing to get her hands dirty, the blade whispers. Until she does, she’ll never truly understand, and never mind the shattering of the dumb love and trust in her dying brother’s eyes.

Only the gods know how much time passes with her sitting there like a fool, before she realises Astrid has opened her eyes and is watching her. Astrid is sprawled across the bed, her head pillowed on her hand. And she’s smiling, as if she knows exactly what Maven is feeling.

“Well?” Astrid murmurs. “Are you going to cut my throat?”

“Maybe I should,” Maven says without thinking. Astrid’s words come to her: _if someone had sent me to kill you, would you want to know who it was?_

Astrid laughs and rises up on her elbows, throwing her head back and arching her back. It bares her throat, but also pushes her breasts out. “You’re welcome to try,” she says.

Instead of cutting her throat with the blade, Maven fucks her with it. She’s more careful than she wants to be, using rubbing the underside of the hilt against Astrid’s cunt, the blade itself curling safely up under her wrist, although nothing about this feel safe. She allows only the first inch or so of the hilt to slip inside with every sawing stroke. The hooks scrape against her knuckles and her fingers curl around the top of the hilt until the black metal is slick and shining and Astrid’s pleasure builds to a wordless gasping peak. She subsides, gasping, her hair sticking to her forehead and her throat flushed. Utterly, utterly at Maven’s mercy, and Astrid knows it, grinning at her, daring her.

Not relinquishing the blade, Maven crawls over her to kiss her and pin her to the bed. She’s no longer certain which of them in control, whether either of them is, or even if she cares – although she should care, damn her to Oblivion, she _should_. Astrid grins up at her, and curls her hand in Maven’s hair, pulling her down so that she can bring her lips to Maven’s ear and whisper:

“I have a present for you.”

* * *

Once, when Maven was a child she went on a trip to Bravil with her mother. She remembers the marshes of Nibenay, the stifling heat, the guards they took with them to protect their goods eyeing the almost-jungle encroaching on the road, here where Black Marsh and Elsweyr squeeze this hard-won patch of the Imperial Province between them, greedy for the land. This was the grim underbelly of Cyrodiil, and Bravil its weakest point, a forest of squalid shacks teetering on rotting stilts raising them above streets that were little more than stagnant streams of slurry, the reek from the canals a crushing miasma, so piercingly strong it made the eyes first sting then weep. Clouds of fragrant smoke, sweet and sickly, seeped through closed shutters and in the shadowed alleyways, the faces of beggars, mostly Betmer, eyed them sourly as they passed.

Cyrodiil might well be richer than Skyrim, her mother told her, but the books must be made to balance somehow, and to pursue wealth is to accept, on some level, the ruination of others. Charity is a sop to the gods and to the consciences of fools: a particularly objectionable lie, the solace of hypocrites, and while the Black-Briars may be many things, they will never be hypocrites.

Even in the middle of the slums and shit and slurry, Maven found a kind of peace. In the square outside the Chapel of Mara stood a statue, well-trodden boards laid out on the mud to provide a slippery walkway all around it. A woman of indeterminate years, her face serene, her five children clustered about her, grasping at her skirts with sticky fingers and stretching out their arms as if begging to be picked up. An idyllic scene, and yet there seemed something off about it, as if at any moment Maven might move and see it suddenly in a different light. As if the face that seemed at first serene might contort in a cruel sneer and the children gathered about her skirts would no longer be demanding to be picked up, but pleading for a mercy that would never come.

Fascinated, and curious that she seemed to be the only one who could see the illusion, Maven touched the statue as the locals did for luck and felt something blossom in her chest, as though the knot of bitterness she carried in her heart had loosened, unfolding like a dried stoneflower bud dropped into water. She always had been an angry child, bitter and petulant and prone to rages, but it spread through her, a cool numbing sensation that tempered her rage, sharpening it until it struck her as a weapon she might some day be able to learn how to wield.

It was, although she wouldn’t realise it for many years later, her first understanding of Sithis.

Even then she had no time then for either the gods or the daedra, but Sithis was neither god nor demon, but an absence, a Void that filled the hollow place inside her chest where her brother would have said a heart should be. The Void was chaos and the absence of life and jealous hunger, but most of all the Void was _opportunity_.

* * *

Her gift is that most unlikely of things: a man. Gagged and trussed up like a pig, with a cord around his throat designed to tighten if he struggles. He reeks of fear and piss, and he cringes away as she kneels to grip his head by his hair so she can look at his face. His gaze twitches from her to Astrid and back again, as if he’s not certain which of them he should be more terrified of. She can’t place his face, although there’s something familiar about him. Not someone who works for her, of that she’s certain.

“Who is he?” she demands.

“Oh,” Astrid says, her voice rich with mockery, “haven’t you guessed?” And then, when Maven scowls up at her, “He’s the one who hired the Brotherhood to slit your throat.”

Maven’s jaw clenches. “So you did come here to kill me.”

“Don’t take it to heart. A contract’s a contract, after all. Unfortunately for him, he underestimated how valued you are to us.”

In Maven’s heart, something squirms. She turns her gaze back to him so Astrid can’t see any flicker of doubt on her face, keeping her disquiet hidden. “He performed the Black Sacrament?”

“And the Brotherhood answered. Unfortunately for him the answer wasn’t what he wanted to hear.”

To this, Maven makes no answer. Astrid places her hand on Maven’s back, an intimate gesture that she resents.

“I thought,” she says, “that you’d want to know.” And she puts the blade into Maven’s hand and squeezes her fist around it. “A life for a life,” she says, although that isn’t how it works: Maven's heard enough old stories to know that. Once the Sacrament has been performed, a life can be bought with a life, it’s true, but it has to be the life of a loved one, and this man is nothing to her.

“There is one thing,” Astrid adds, almost as if it’s an afterthought.

“What?”

“He did it on the behalf of another. Someone close to you. Someone who was unwilling to perform the Sacrament themselves.”

In other words, Maven thinks, someone afraid to get their hands dirty. And it is this, more than the assassination attempt, that floods her with cold burning rage. The _cowardice_ of it. The cringing weakness. And while there is no shortage of people who might want her dead, it is to several in particular that her mind goes: Sibbi and Hemming and Ingun. She might even be proud if it wasn’t for the inescapable fact of that cowardice, which goes against everything she ever taught them. Her three children–

No, she thinks. Not Ingun. Ingun would do the bloody business herself. She'd treat it as one of her experiments, she might even take pleasure in it, but the others...

Her fury builds, and she directs it towards the man, Astrid’s gift, frantically twisting his body in a hopeless attempt to get away from her, moaning in pain as the rope cuts tight into his throat. Her children aren’t idiots. Chances are this hapless fool doesn’t even know who hired him. Whether she’ll get anything of use from him, she doesn’t know.

But what she does know is that she has an answer for Ingun now, and she knows her daughter well enough to know what her reaction will be. Sithis is as close to a god as Maven will ever know, and her soul has been marked for him. She thought, the first time she ever met Astrid, that she glimpsed the Void in her eyes, but perhaps she only saw what she wanted to see: something that was in truth nothing more than a cold, calculating sort of sanity, the eyes of a woman who had turned her rage at the world into a weapon and learned how to take pleasure in it. Maven seeing what she wanted to see.

Maven’s business instincts are too finely honed for her not to recognise a bad investment when she sees one. Damn it all to Oblivion, she’ll have to be doubly careful when she eats her meals in the future.

“So...” Astrid leans in and places a kiss against her cheek. “I’ll give you two some privacy.”

Before she leaves, Maven calls out to her. “Astrid?” Her voice sounds strange; for the first time in a long time it carries a note of uncertainty. She isn’t going to look around, but then she does, sees Astrid standing in a patch of moonlight filtering through from an open wound in the brickwork. She’s frowning, as if Maven has surprised her. Maven isn’t used to being at a loss for words, and what she meant to say has deserted her, so for a long time she flounders, searching for words. “Be careful,” she says finally, and Astrid raises an eyebrow as if that was the last thing she expected to hear.

“Always,” she says, and then she’s gone.


End file.
